Introduction
With the release of smart contracts on the Cardano blockchain developers are now able to develop & create new projects. While there are projects launching on the Cardano that investors can purchase and trade, there are integrations happening with the ecosystem that don’t serve a financial function. It is our belief that along with the ecosystem waking up, these specific integrations will benefit by giving Cardano a serious technological advantage over other smart contact platforms.
We’re sure by now all of you are familiar with Cardano through our reports but also through its meteoric success during the 2020/2021 bull-run. During most of this run the price was driven by speculation as Cardano was being build and had no working product till September 12th 2021. During the run up to the Alonzo Hardfork the Charles Hoskinson had made some bold claims about what Cardano will be able to do and where it’s going. Now that the working product is live it’s time to see what Cardano is capable of.
Ethos
Before looking at these integrations into the Cardano ecosystem it’s probably worth refreshing your understanding of what this blockchain aims to provide.
Charles has spoken in great length on livestreams and in interviews about what he hopes Cardano will grow to be. In essence Cardano is looking to fix problems that people and communities in developed and developing nations encounter by creating fairer systems to build on.
These systems are not only financial, they are also the infrastructure that runs things like education, healthcare, telecommunication and governments. By being more decentralised, faster, and secure than other blockchains, the Cardano Foundation is looking to bring a new generation of people online.
Wolfram Alpha
Announced long before the 2021 Cardano Summit and the reveal of the ChainLink partnership, the integration of Wolfram Alpha into Cardano was already in the works. If you look at the early ecosystem and partnership roster, you’ll see Wolfram Alpha in the Oracle section so it would be easy to assume that it is providing data services to the network. The real utility to this is a lot more complex than just another oracle and in this report, we aim to explain why Wolfram Alpha is a powerful string in Cardano’s bow.
Not a token
Some of you might be disappointed to hear that Wolfram Alpha is not a project that you can purchase. Or at least not at the time of writing. This report is designed to help you understand one of Cardano’s advantages over its competitors and what that might mean for the projects future.
Origin
Wolfram Alpha was founded by a computer scientist named Steven Wolfram. As well as being a well-known programmer and mathematician, Steven Wolfram is also the creator of the Wolfram programming language. To avoid boring you all with too much detail, the Wolfram programming language is used to solve mathematical problems, rule based programming and symbolic computation. What this means is that the programming language is made to solve problem and identify real things. Almost like an AI. This programming language has existed for over 30 years and is unique in that what it learns it remembers and has over this time created a “Knowledgebase”
What is Wolfram Alpha?
The Wolfram programming language was not commonly used by software engineers unless you happen to work at somewhere like MIT. It wasn’t until 2009 that the Wolfram programming language had an accessible front end and had the clever addition of natural language statements into the Wolfram quires data-base. This meant that instead of using complex programming code to work out equations on the software, users could input a question similar to how they might ask Google “How far away is the moon from the earth?”
You might be wondering how is this different from using Google? When you ask Google a question it searches the web for the most common or right answer and presents you with the best links to that information “How far away is the moon from the earth? 384,400 km”. There are limitations to what you can ask Google as the calculations would be too complex or there might not be a search result for the question such as a mathematical problem like “graph x⌃2”. The Wolfram language would identify the variables in the equation, search for verified data then compute and store the answer.
Wolfram Alpha is unlike AI as it is not able to ask itself questions or make decision on its own. It is a computational knowledge engine for calculation, visualisation, and statistics, so you as a user need to ask the questions yourself. If you’ve ever asked Siri or Alexa a maths or science question, there’s a chance you’re using Wolfram Alpha and it was also used to power some of Microsoft Bing and DuckDuckGo search engines. The long-term goal for WolframAlpha is to understand the world in computational language. You can try it yourself if you want on their website - www.wolframalpha.com
Benefits to Cardano
There are already several good data oracles integrating with blockchains and the Cardano foundation is already making use of ChainLink, Charli3, Ergo and API. All of these come with different strengths and unique applications that help developers create the best dApps possible. As Cardano is open source and decentralised it’s in their best interest to give developers all the options available. What integration with Wolfram Alpha provides is not just another data oracle but a constantly growing computational knowledge machine that developers can leverage in a large variety of ways. Although this is early days for the Cardano ecosystem and we don’t yet know how this will be used, there are a few places where this could bring a significant advantage over the competition.
Benefits to Wolfram Alpha
With all good partnerships, the deal benefits both parties. As blockchains become more advanced and more transactions begin to take place, they will become a source of data. WolframAlpha will incorporate the transactional data from the Cardano blockchain into the Wolfram ecosystem. As Cardano is positioning itself as a blockchain for governments, institutions and telecoms, the data from this blockchain will become very useful.
Computational Contracts
Smart contracts use data on blockchains to execute orders. With the use of an oracle they can rely on real word data to execute orders. Computational contracts would work as an ever-watching oracle that creates a domino effect to oracle networks based on real world events. Imagine WolframAlpha as the mother oracle to the oracle network ecosystem. Computational contracts represent the use of statistical, mathematical, law or physics data into the blockchain oracles at an advanced level and we are excited to see where this piece of technology goes.
Disclaimer: NOT FINANCIAL NOR INVESTMENT ADVICE. Only you are responsible for any capital-related decisions you make and only you are accountable for the results.